Be prepared for fabric

Many organisations have people that are experts in the networking, storage and computing areas, but it could be a challenge to bring all that together, he says.

“It depends on which direction you want to go,” he says. “A number of organisations that I have spoken to, that don’t have the skills in place, have been prepared to pay the premium and go and get a fabric-based [system] from one of the vendors.”

At the end of the day, it’s a numbers game, he says. “It’s the return on investment and the speed of which you want to deploy. If you’ve got the skills and the time up your sleeve, you can go and buy your servers, your storage and your networking all separately and bring it together.”

FBI is a growing area but it is not going to replace people buying traditional servers, says Sargeant. Gartner estimates the market penetration is going to be 5 to 6 percent in three to four years. He knows of implementations in both Australia and New Zealand; there are two or three examples in New Zealand, including a couple of banks, he says.

The two vendors that tend to dominate the space at the moment are Cisco and HP, according to Sargeant, with Dell and IBM not far behind.

“A number of vendors are starting to look at this space seriously.”

Sargeant’s advice for organisations that are considering going down the fabric path is to be prepared for a certain degree of vendor lock-in.

“Negotiate hard and understand what the cost might be in the future.”

He also recommends looking at the ROI — “you are probably going to have to pay a premium, versus doing it yourself”.

“If you need something quickly, I would recommend looking at this, taking ROI and lock-in into consideration,” he says.